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    Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009
    Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009
    Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009
    Ebook179 pages1 hour

    Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009

    By Mark Galeotti

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    About this ebook

    In this fully illustrated book an expert on the conflicts traces the progress of the wars in Chechnya, from the initial Russian advance through to urban battles such as Grozny, and the prolonged guerrilla warfare in the mountainous regions. He assesses how the wars have torn apart the fabric of Chechen society and their impact on Russia itself. Featuring specially drawn full-colour mapping and drawing upon a wide range of sources, this succinct account explains the origins, history and consequences of Russia's wars in Chechnya, shedding new light on the history – and prospects – of the troubled region.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateDec 20, 2014
    ISBN9781782002796
    Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009
    Author

    Mark Galeotti

    Mark Galeotti is a scholar of Russian security affairs with a career spanning academia, government service and business, a prolific author and frequent media commentator. He heads the Mayak Intelligence consultancy and is an Honorary Professor at University College London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies as well as holding fellowships with RUSI, the Council on Geostrategy and the Institute of International Relations Prague. He has been Head of History at Keele University, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and a Visiting Professor at Rutgers-Newark, Charles University (Prague) and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He is the author of over 25 books including A Short History of Russia (Penguin, 2021) and The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022).

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      Book preview

      Russia’s Wars in Chechnya 1994–2009 - Mark Galeotti

      (Stringer/EPA)

      Background to war

      Home of the wolf

      We are free and equal, like wolves.

      – Chechen saying

      Homeland of the wolf

      The national symbol of the Chechens, visible everywhere from badges and knife pommels to the flag of the independent ‘Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’ – Ichkeria is the traditional Turkic name for the region – is the wolf, borz in Nokhchy. Chechen folklore stresses the wolf’s role as both loner and pack-member and this duality is visible in Chechen society, too. It is traditionally dominated by the tribe and the clan (teip), each being made up of lines (gars) and families (nekye), governed by the male elders who interpret the adat, traditional law. While the adat and the collective wisdom of the elders are important, though, these are forever in tension with an egalitarian, competitive and aggressive spirit of adventure and independence.

      The flag of the independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria has a green background to symbolize the state’s Islamic roots and also as a representation of life. The red stripe stands for the blood shed in the name of freedom and the wolf on the state coat of arms is a traditional Chechen symbol. (Public domain)

      To the Chechens, after all, the wolf symbolizes courage and a love of freedom, but also implicitly a predator’s spirit. Traditionally, Chechen culture was a raiding one, in which young men would prove themselves by raiding other tribes and teips – even ones with whom they were on good terms – for horses or cattle or even brides. These raids, which were meant to be essentially bloodless (although a raider caught by his intended victims might face a good beating before being released or ransomed), were also ways of maintaining the skills that would make the Chechens formidable guerrillas. Killing another Chechen would simply bring blood feud from his kin; the feud is a powerful force in such a society, and in some cases ran from generation to generation.

      Historically the Chechens have thus been politically fragmented but culturally united. While sharing the same language, identity and traditions, individual tribes and teips essentially managed their own affairs, except when some common enemy threatened. Then they would typically unite behind some charismatic warlord, such as Imam Shamil in the 19th century and Dzhokhar Dudayev in the 21st, to break apart once again when the conflict was over or the leader had fallen.

      Chechens meet Russians

      The only good Chechen is a dead Chechen.

      – Attributed to General Alexei Yermolov, 1812

      Traditionally, Russian attitudes towards the Chechens have been complex, a mix of fear, hatred and respect. In the main, the Russians have considered the gortsy, the ‘mountaineers’ as they sometimes call the peoples of the North Caucasus, to be generally untrustworthy, wily yet primitive. However, the Chechens assumed a special place in the 19th-century Russian idea of the Caucasus, sometimes the noble savage, often just the savage. Mikhail Lermontov’s Cossack Lullaby, for example, includes the lines ‘The Terek runs over its rocky bed./And splashes its dark wave;/A sly brigand crawls along the bank;/Sharpening his dagger’ while in the song the Cossack mother reassures her child that ‘your father is an old warrior; hardened in battle’. There was something different, something alarming about the Chechens. To a considerable extent this reflects the tenacity, skill and ferocity with which they have fought against Russian imperialism since the earliest contacts.

      Although Cossack communities, seeking an independent life outside Tsarist control, settled in the North Caucasus as far back as the 16th century, it was really only in the 18th century that the Chechens and the Russian state encountered each other. There were skirmishes during Peter the Great’s 1722–23 Caucasus campaign against Safavid Iran that showed that the Chechens in their home forests were not to be taken lightly, but it was the struggle against Sheikh Mansur (1732–94) which began in 1784 that truly alerted the Russians to the threat they faced. A Chechen Muslim imam, or religious leader, educated in the Sufi tradition, Mansur was angered by the survival of so many pre-Islamic traditions within Chechnya and campaigned for the universal adoption of sharia Islamic law over the adat. He declared a holy war – jihad or, in the North Caucasus, gazavat – initially against ‘corrupt Muslims’ who did not recognize the primary of sharia and, coincidentally, his own authority.

      This was an essentially domestic issue, but Mansur’s message became increasingly popular across the North Caucasus as a whole and followers of other ethnic groups began flocking to his cause. When the Russian authorities heard that he was planning to invade neighbouring Kabardia to spread his word, and even opening negotiations with the Ottoman Empire, they became alarmed. The Ottomans were the Russians’ main rivals along their southwestern flank, and Mansur’s holy war could easily and quickly be turned against Orthodox Christian Russia. Contemptuous of Mansur’s ‘scoundrels’ and ‘ragamuffins’, the Russians sent the Astrakhan Regiment into Chechnya, to Mansur’s home village of Aldy. Finding it empty, they put it to the torch, handing Mansur perfect grounds to declare gazavat against the Russians. Ambushed by the Chechens at the Sunzha River crossing as they marched back, the Russians were massacred: up to 600 were killed, 100 captured and the regiment disintegrated, individuals and small groups hunted down as they tried to flee through the woods.

      Tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), depicted in an 1838 work by Paul Delaroche (1797–1856). Although Peter the Great is best known for building St Petersburg and his European military adventures, his Azov campaigns against the Ottoman Empire (1695–96) continued a drift to the south in Russian imperial expansion that would bring them into collision with the Chechens. (Public domain)

      Buoyed by this success, Mansur gathered a force of up to 12,000 fighters from across the North Caucasus, although Chechens were the largest contingent. His skills were as charismatic leader rather than strategist, though, and Mansur made the mistake of crossing into Russian territory and trying to take the fortress of Kizlyar. Fighting the Russian Army on its own terms and in its own territory, Mansur’s forces were routed. Although Mansur would remain active until his capture in 1791, whenever he took the field against the Russians, he lost. Even so, he had demonstrated that the Chechens could be formidable when united against a foreign enemy and fighting their own kind of war.

      Hitherto, though, Chechnya had been considered something of an irrelevance, a land rich only in troublesome locals. The real prize was Georgia to the south, and the real enemies were Safavid Iran and the Ottomans. When Georgia was annexed in 1801, secure routes to Imperial Russia’s newest possession began to matter. Once Russia found itself at war with both Iran (1804–13) and the Ottoman Empire (1807–09), then the need to shore up the Caucasus flank meant that St Petersburg finally decided it was time to extend its rule in the North Caucasus.

      The chosen instrument was General Alexei Yermolov, an artilleryman who had distinguished himself during the war with Napoleon and who was made viceroy of the Caucasus. He set out to subjugate the highlands by a policy of deliberate, methodical brutality. His strategy was to build fortified bases and settlements across the region, to bring in Cossack soldier-settlers and to respond to risings and provocations with savage reprisals. Infamously, he affirmed ‘I desire that the terror of my name shall guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses.’

      Yermolov was especially wary of the Chechens, whom he considered ‘a bold and dangerous people’. He founded the fortress of Grozny in 1818 – the name means ‘Dread’ – as a base from which to control the central lowlands. His aim was to pen the Chechens in the mountains, clearing the fertile lowlands between the Terek and Sunzha rivers for Cossack settlers. They in turn would cut down the forests that gave the Chechens such an advantage. In 1821, the Chechens held a gathering of the teips to unite against the Russians; Yermolov responded with a campaign to drive the Chechens into the highlands with fire, shot and sword. Even so, the Chechens were beleaguered but not beaten. In a sign of things to come, terrorism and assassination began to supplement raids in their tactical repertoire. In 1825 two of Yermolov’s most notorious officers, Lieutenant-General Dmitri Lissanievich and Major-General Nikolai Grekov, died when an imam, brought in for interrogation, produced a hidden dagger and stabbed them both. The Russians executed 300 Chechens in

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